Getting only three hits is a hard way to win a game
The 2024 Orioles, like last year’s squad before them, have a remarkable ability to keep maintaining the best record in the American League while periodically losing games that make you feel like this is the harbinger of familiar poor things to come. Alright, I shouldn’t want to speak for you, maybe that’s just my own psychological issue with this team having never played in a World Series game in my lifetime. They played another one of those games on Tuesday night, dropping the opener of a two-game set against the Nationals, 3-0.
If you want to go ahead and tip your cap to the opponent, it is true that tonight’s Washington starter, Trevor Williams, brought a 2.27 ERA into the game and with five shutout innings against the O’s lowered that to 1.96. This is not one of those mystifying “bad game against a bad pitcher” outings. Whatever Williams is doing with 2nd percentile fastball velocity, he’s fooling the rest of the league too so far.
This fact does not make it any more fun that Williams, who has not been a strikeout pitcher while having that success, struck out eight Orioles batters over his five innings. It is also not much fun that four Nationals relievers combined to hold the Orioles to one hit in four innings. The O’s did not draw any walks in Tuesday night’s game. They totaled all of three hits. This is not a recipe for victory unless perhaps your own starting pitcher throws a no-hitter.
Corbin Burnes had the kind of first inning where you could at least wonder dreamily if something special might be happening tonight, striking out three Nats batters even if the perfect game watch was ended after a two-out walk. Burnes, however, did not record another strikeout until the fifth inning. He closed out his Tuesday outing with six strikeouts, a number he hasn’t topped in a single game since Opening Day.
Burnes’s no-hitter watch was also ended quite early, with Nats left fielder Jesse Winker leading off the second inning with a seeing-eye single that just snuck past Jordan Westburg at second base and into right field. The Nationals, you may have heard, lead the league in stolen bases and the Orioles are not good at holding runners.
It is a bad combination. Winker quickly stole second, getting himself into scoring position, and then scored as the batter, Joey Meneses, reached out and poked an opposite-field single on an outside-the-zone 2-2 pitch from Burnes. Winker scored easily, providing all of the offense that the Nationals turned out to need.
The home team did not get another hit off of Burnes until the seventh inning. With the O’s narrowly trailing and Burnes not at too high of a pitch count, manager Brandon Hyde opted to leave his former Cy Young winner in there. The decision pleased me at the time but it did not pay off.
Meneses began that inning with a double and eventually scored as Nats right fielder Eddie Rosario also pulled a fortunate “hit an outside pitch the other way” hit to drive the runner home. Rosario stole second base, one of four Nationals steals in the game – and one of two that directly led to a run scoring. #9 batter Trey Lipscomb also was able to go the opposite way, in his case an inside-out swing on an inside pitch, and Rosario scored.
Burnes’s six innings with one run allowed abruptly ballooned to a 6.1 inning start with three runs allowed. That’s not nearly as fun. Hyde brought in reliever Jacob Webb, who allowed a stolen base of his own, walked a guy, and then got the final two outs of the inning. This 3-0 Nationals lead is the score that held for the rest of the way.
The Orioles had just three hits. That’s really all there is to say. Adley Rutschman had a one-out single in the first inning. Jordan Westburg hit a one-out single in the fifth. Cedric Mullins did this same thing in the eighth. No Orioles leadoff batter in an inning reached base. No one did much of anything good. There is little else to say.
Based on the view of the strike zone as seen through the box on the MASN broadcast, the Orioles had some legitimate beefs with the consistency of plate umpire Alex Tosi’s strike zone. The frustration finally boiled over when Ryan O’Hearn struck out for the game’s penultimate out, a looking strikeout that appeared to be inside. Tosi gave O’Hearn the heave-ho, prompting Hyde to come out, expressing incredulity, and also get thrown out from the game.
In these cases, I always look to check the Umpire Scorecards Twitter account tomorrow morning to see what it has to say about the previous day’s game. Sometimes, the umpire is about as bad as the screen box makes him look.
Other times, you have to remember that the plate creates a three-dimensional strike zone that the box can’t duplicate – or that there just might be slight errors in the way the box displays on our screens. (For one example of a reasonably bad one, Saturday’s home plate umpire’s calls were worth +1.09 runs to the Reds. In a one-run game, that’s a lot!) Maybe Tosi was bad with his zone in a way that particularly hosed the Orioles, maybe he wasn’t.
After the game, O’Hearn broke down his feelings on the final at-bat to Orioles reporters, saying, “(The first pitch) he called a ball that was less inside. When I see where a pitch is and I go, OK, that’s a ball there, and then he throws one a little bit further inside and he bangs me out on that one, that’s pretty irritating.” A quick glance at the Gameday strike zone confirms O’Hearn’s impression that pitch 1, a called ball, was farther inside than pitch 4, a called strike.
In either case, no asterisks will go into anybody’s season stats over what happened in this game based on who the umpire was or what kind of calls he made. The stuff that happened is what happened. It wasn’t a fun one. At least it was over in only two hours and 19 minutes.
As of this writing, the Yankees are thoroughly demolishing the Astros, so the Orioles will end the night tied atop the division in the games back column, rather than having a one-game cushion. The O’s will still hold the lead by percentage points.
The Orioles can try to do better tomorrow night as the short series closes out with a 6:45 scheduled start. Rookie lefty Mitchell Parker is set to get the ball for Washington, with the O’s sending Kyle Bradish. I hope he has a wider margin for error than the hitters gave Burnes tonight. The sweepless streak is on the line quickly in a two-game set.